Cheap tricks can create a much more responsive experience.

Whenever a user interactable element will be ready in <~100ms, you can display it as ready now, because it is faster than the reaction speed of a human, which makes all interactions with the software faster, smoother and more responsive than if I used a loading indicator. It's a free win.

Whenever you know in advance you need to display something to the user and need to load/process something that takes much longer than 100ms, you can load in the background while displaying whatever needs to be displayed and if the time spent on the screen is slower than the loading time then the next interaction will be instant (common case), if the user is faster on the screen you can still go to a loading screen, but the time it is on screen for would still be much much shorter.

> Whenever you know in advance

Knowing things in advance is not a cheap trick. I’m not talking about a well structured boot. I’m talking about the far more common approach of just showing a moving mouse pointer and a few icons and “pretending” the computer is ready to use, a notion that is quickly disabused as soon as you try to get to work. Then even, you will her no way to know when it “is” actually ready.

Do you believe that you can reason about a computer? I'm going to assume yes. If you'd rather your computer do the countable number of things you know it needs to do, before it draws to the display because it's faster. That's only because you know thoes things exist, and how long they should reasonably take. Most users can't count them, nor do they trust their computer. The loading screen does satisfy them because they know the computer hasn't randomly crapped out... *again*. People who don't understand how to fix computers don't trust them. Rightfully so, they generally dont do what their owner/users want, and randomly will just break costing more money, for seemingly no reason. Those loading screens prevent some of the anxiety of using something you need when you don't understand any part of it.

Today's laptops and the majority of desktops boot more than 10x faster than they did a decade ago, so for all but the youngest users I feel like this point is moot. There was an age where you had to go get a coffee while your hard drive started spinning up, I remember kids starting their Macbooks before they got in the car for school so they'd be booted by the time they were in class...

When I was a kid, kids weren't issued MacBooks for class. There was a single, lone Apple II in the back we played Oregon Trail on -- and it took a fair few minutes to load from floppy.

A floppy drive? Get off my lawn

On my C64 I'd start loading a game from cassette tape before dinner so I could play it afterwards.

Cassette? Pah!

I had to type the games source code in from a magazine for my acorn electron.

Cassette tape?

Punched tape[0]: Hold my beer

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape

I don't think punched tape or punched card was ever used for a personal computer though.

The Altair launched with a cassette tape interface anyway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Fair enough, but would it be fair to argue that personal computer is a pricing distinction, rather than a technology distinction?

In my mental model, the technology distinction is more between single user and multi-user systems. And arguably that is more a a software differentiator than a hardware difference.

Floppy drive?

On my 9 track tape I would be lucky if the thing loaded and was ready to use 72 hours later [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape

I … think I agree with you …

Yes, it does matter. If Microsoft switched things up to provide users with a responsive desktop just after logging by loading more services before the login screen comes up, existing Windows users would perceive it as slower. If Linux distributions delayed the loading of services at the expense of a less responsive desktop just after logging in, existing Linux users would perceive it as slower. Simply put, each user base is using different metrics for boot time and their metrics are based upon their prior experiences.

> for a few minutes

When is the last time you cold booted a modern Apple Macbook for example?... Minutes is an absolute exaggeration.